Moby Dick; or, the Whale review by Josh

Moby Dick is so much better than its reputation led me to believe it would be. I expected four-hundred pages of meandering prose about the misery of the human condition. What I got was six-hundred pages (I was even wrong about the length!) of jaunty, conversational, and good humored meditation on everything from depression, to savages, to whales. Yes, whales!

Strange: the criticism I have read (not much) led me to think that it was about obsession and revenge. This is not the case! It seems to me that Moby Dick is most centrally a book about whales. Every detail of whale anatomy, physiology, and psychology is discussed at lengths far beyond what any metaphor would require. Personally I'm guessing Melville was just seriously into whales. Nothing wrong with that, they are pretty neat.

I give it four stars instead of five because the final 400 pages drag on a bit. The first 200 are a blast though.